ELL Parent Involvement of Recent Immigrants from Israel, Russia, and Uzbekistan

The purpose of this research is to determine successful ways schools, teachers, and classrooms can effectively foster partnerships with parents of English language learners who are recent immigrants from Russia, Uzbekistan, and Israel. As schools struggle to overcome institutional bias and lack of understanding of how to accommodate the needs of the growing population of immigrant students from diverse countries, immigrant parents also struggle to fit into a new cultural environment and to secure the best education for their children. This qualitative study was conducted in one school in Phoenix, Arizona. Through interviews with ten parents of English language learners and nine teachers of ELL students, this research provides information about the barriers and opportunities that teachers and parents of English language learners faced in improving academic success for English language students who were children of immigrants. The findings and conclusions consist of the following: (a) schools and parents must communicate well in order to develop into a team that supports the students, (b) schools may need to provide additional resources to ELL teachers and parents in order to support the students, and (c) school cultures may need to change through cultural trainings and signage in order to become more welcoming toward ELL parents. This work is limited by the fact that it was completed in only one school with a narrow population. The information gathered here informs the discussion in schools regarding ways that school leaders and teachers can work more effectively with immigrant parents to support in the home the academic goals of English language students.;Key search terms: English Language Learners, immigrant parents, school-parent communication, school-family connection, Bukharian students...